Making a Killing in YA

Having learned nothing from my last foray into young adult literature, I've decided to try it again. As part of my prep, I'm raiding the library for the current popular sellers, to see what I'm up against. Ye godz. I am seriously going to have to up my game if I want to compete in this market.

For the moment, it appears the Twilight/paranormal and Hunger Games/distopia fads have run their course. What I'm seeing a lot of now is otherworld fantasy, sort of Game of Thrones lite with a bit of the X-Men thrown in (the kids in some of the books have superpowers). This makes reading them like old home week for me. I grew up haunting the Science Fiction section of the bookstore, which is where these would have been shelved back when I belonged to their target demographic. In those days books for tweens and teens consisted primarily of contemporaries and mysteries. Those of us with a penchant for weird read Lord of the Rings, and Stephen King when he showed up. Then Harry Potter and Twilight came along, and all of a sudden YA was a thing. And here we are.

So I'm in Barnes & Noble skimming through Throne of Glass (somebody else got the library's copy) and I notice something interesting: the protag, a young woman constantly referred to as the best assassin in her world and a total badass, never seems to kill anybody.

Come to think of it, the whole point of Hunger Games was two dozen teenagers turned loose in a huge arena to kill each other. How many did Katniss kill? One, I think. She may have shot some guy. Mostly she ran and hid and let them kill each other. Katniss was not a killer, and no fool.

The publishers of these books, however, I have to wonder about.

In following the Game of Thrones formula of intrigue and nasty doings in a high fantasy setting, coupled with the call for kickass ladies fueled by Hunger Games and Divergent, publishers are putting out stories of teenaged assassins and swordfighters and rebels against the (adult) government and presenting them in a light that makes them look heroic. Maybe not the best of ideas. I have to question the marketing strategy of glamorizing killing to a segment of the population known to take deadly weapons to school and bully classmates into suicide.

Somebody else must have brought this up at a board meeting, because these teenage killers don't enjoy what they do. It wasn't even their choice: they were forced into it by evil adults. Even though they've been trained from childhood to kill, they usually don't. The greatest assassin in her world spends a lot of her time knocking people unconscious. As soon as they can, they leave the profession and become—I dunno, maybe a housewife. All these chicks have boyfriends, killers like themselves.

This dilemma—we wanna read about tough teenage girls, but kids killing others is wrong—can lead to absurd and even frustrating situations, like the assassin mentioned above. If she doesn't off somebody, she's liable to look like she's all talk. But do you really want your 14-year-old daughter "watching" a 17-year-old slicing people up? Getting the idea that's a good thing? We must protect The Children!

That's one way around the problem. When these kids do kill, it's justifiable. Nobody's going to blame Harry Potter for magically blasting Voldemort. On the other hand, Harry was 17-18 years old by Book 7, pretty much an adult. In the Percy Jackson series, Percy's only 16 in the climactic novel. He doesn't kill the bad guy. The secondary bad guy has a change of heart, offs the major bad guy, and then dies a hero. In the Throne of Glass series, Celaena finally does kill somebody, but it's the wrong guy. She was tricked by the head of the Assassins' Guild. There's a man who seriously deserves to get a knife in the gut. Will she do it? She'll be over 18 by the end of the series, so probably.

It helps that these books are set in fantasy or future worlds that have nothing to do with our modern reality. Different worlds, different times, different societies. Same old sexist attitudes, but that's a different blog. It's okay for kids to be trained killers in these books because the stories take place somewhere else and not in middle America. Don't try this at home, kids! Or at school.

As for the hundreds of innocent techs, scientists, military grunts and support crew who perished when twentysomething Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, it's best we don't think about them. They destroyed Alderaan; I suppose they had it coming.

For the book I'm fiddling with, I won't have to worry about any of this. My story is set in modern America, so showing kids who kill is out of the question. My protag doesn't need to kill. She's a shapechanger. She can knock grown men out with the best of them. My biggest problem will be matching the quality of the writing in similar YA books currently on the market. I've definitely got my work cut out for me.

(No Subject)

I don’t have anything specific to talk about this week, so I’m just going to jump around. We’ll start with an entry from the “Oh, the Irony” column. The local library’s running a promotion for Banned Books Week: get your photo taken with a banned book. Somebody else got Stephen King, so I went with Harry Potter. (By the way, have you seen that “fanfic” some alleged housewife is writing, that replaces all the references to magic in Sorcerer’s Stone with Christian ideology? In the first installment, Harry is rescued from his Godless existence and learns true Christian values. Common consensus among fandom is that this is really a satire perpetrated by one or more pro writers as a joke. Geez, I certainly hope so. Oh, and since Dumbledore was revealed as gay in the actual series, I suppose we can look forward to a priest-and-altar-boys subplot in an upcoming installment.)

While I was there, I told the ladies running the camera I write erotic romance, but the library’s content filter won’t let me access my publisher’s web site—in effect, banning me from viewing my own output. Their response was instantaneous: “There’s nothing we can do.” It’s the computer program, you see, not the fault of anyone human. I considered asking them who programmed the computer, but I suspect that would have been futile. Apparently the computer programmed itself and makes its own decisions independent of human direction, Hey, scientific community, look over here! The Lancaster County library system has successfully created AI! Terrific. Amish Country will one day be the birthplace of the Terminator. (“Come with me if you want to live, vunst.”) Now we can be famous for more than just buggies and Witness.

I forgot to mention how the filter fails to stop kids from getting into such fun sites as tips for growing pot indoors and how to build a pipe bomb. As long as you’re not having sex with stuff, the program thinks it’s okay. I did point out that the books the program’s designed to block are still readily accessible on Amazon. This revelation took them by surprise. In point of fact, you can still find flat out porn using the library system if you know which sites to look for.

Maybe instead of a computer program they should get that housewife “fixing” Harry Potter to flag sites inappropriate for children. That would reduce options to Teletubby fan sites and the 700 Club home page. I really need to get home Internet.

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Over on our other blog, Shapeshifter Seductions, we’re in the process of putting the serial story together for self-publication. I downloaded the Smashwords style guide and read through it. Now my head hurts. I’ve been working with computers since the early ‘80s, worked for typesetting companies off and on for at least ten years, I’ve got Microsoft Word on my laptop, and I can’t tell you a thing about coding, fonts or typography. I didn’t pay much attention to that stuff. I was just there to type. Maybe that would explain why I kept getting laid off from these places.

But what really gets me is covers. I don’t know how to do graphic design either, in spite of that background listed above. I took a six-week course in Adobe way back when, but didn’t pursue it. How was I to know publishing your own ebooks would become a thing fifteen-odd years later? Who even heard of ebooks fifteen years ago?

I’ve also got a bone to pick with stock images. Covers aren’t created by artists any more. They’re compiled from disparate images through Photoshop. If your lead character has a distinctive tattoo or hair style and they don’t have a picture of it in the files, you and your book are SOL. I foresee a lot of bland, similar-looking covers (with identical-looking leads) in the future.

We’re having that problem right now with our cover for the serial story. We’re trying to come up with a mammoth for the background. The one in the book was a mutated creature with wolf and human attributes, but there aren’t any stock images of that. We’ll have to settle for a generic mammoth (and when’s the last time you saw that term used in a sentence?). It might take longer, but it would look so much better, and much more unique, if we could just draw the damn thing. Why didn’t I take art in college instead of English?

I know I said we weren’t going to gather all the story’s separate posts together into a book. I lied. I’m a lying swine. There, I said it. Never trust a writer. We’re doing it as a promotional aid. The plan is to introduce ourselves and create awareness of our blog (and the books we wrote and advertise on it) to a wider audience. It’s what I’ve been talking about these last three weeks. This is us attempting to reach those million people who, we hope, will give us each a dollar. The serial story itself will be free, but if they like what they read they might check out our backlists. See how it all fits together?

One last thing. If your goal is to be a writer, don’t major in English in college. Take something that’ll let you earn a living. You can learn more from reading a really bad book than any lit courses anyway. But not our books. Our books are great. Keep those dollars coming!

Trendy

If you’ll glance to your right, you’ll notice I’ve added the cover for Slayer for Hire to our list of books. This is my spinoff from Belonging and Legacy; one of the leads is the son of the Legacy threesome. It’s also YA and has no sex scenes. It’s perfectly safe for anyone 14 or older. Oh yeah, there are vampires, and a couple of people get attacked and killed. But nobody has on-screen sex. That’s far more important to a lot of people, including my library’s content filter. Go figure.

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I didn’t write Slayer because YA was really big at the time. Ditto for the inclusion of vampires. It was a story I wanted to write, and nagged at me until I committed it to paper/screen. That’s pretty much how all my books and stories come into being. Some idea gets into my head and keeps kicking my brain and demanding, “Write me write me write me.” So I do. If the nagging lasts long enough for me to get it finished, off to market it goes. If not, it goes into the closet for exhumation at a later date. If it stays in the closet, the idea probably wasn’t that important to me to begin with.

I don’t write to trends. I’m not even aware of trends. I can’t see them coming, and every time I jump I miss the bandwagon. I’m like Hollywood. By the time I notice a trend, it’s over. I write whichever idea hits, and it takes me forever to finish it. Sometimes I get lucky and one of my ideas turns into a trend by the time I finish the book. Then the book comes out just in time to hit the wave. It makes me look smarter than I am.

For instance, I discovered I like writing M/M just as it was getting big. Some publisher put out an open call for angel and/or demon stories. So I wrote about an angel and a demon, both male, who discovered they really, really liked each other. It wasn’t intentional. My mind just happened to skew in that direction. It didn’t sell to that publisher but did to another, and all of a sudden I was trendy.

I didn’t switch from SF/fantasy to romance because romance was big. I just felt like writing romance for a while. I may switch back, especially if that horror/fantasy I exhumed from the closet sells. Or I may switch over to straight horror. Stephen King doesn’t write the kind of stories that made him famous any more. Somebody should step in to fill the void. Maybe I can start a new horror trend, just like he did when he started publishing.

Because that’s the secret to trends. You don’t want to follow one, or try to anticipate or guess what it’s going to be. You want to start the trend. Let everybody else follow you.

Everybody’s always looking for the “next big thing.” What’s going to be hugely profitable six months to a year from now? Lots of money and people’s careers hinge on guessing right. Editors and agents put out lists of what they’re looking for, things they want to see. Writers pour over these lists and write what they think the market wants.

Until one writer (name not given, so I can’t properly credit him/her) put everything into perspective with a single Tweet: “Remember, nobody was looking for Harry Potter.”

So how did J. K. Rowling become a megaseller and kick off a massive feeding frenzy for middle grade/young adult fantasy? By writing the book she wanted to write, and doing a damn good job of it. Readers responded to her belief in her story and characters, and the rest is publishing history.

Ditto for Stephenie Meyer and Suzanne Collins. I doubt if publishers were looking for teenage vampire romances or YA dystopias until Twilight and The Hunger Games crossed their desks. Now the market’s saturated and you can’t give the damn things away. On to the next trend.

Which will be … what? Hell, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. I can tell you how it’ll start, though. Some writer will write the book that’s pounding in their brain. They’ll eat, sleep, and breathe their characters’ lives and world. It may share tropes in common with countless previous books, but be told in a way that makes it new and unique. It will have that something, that magic, in the writing that speaks to the heart of the reader, and readers will respond. The publishing world will look at some surface aspect—“Oh, it has oppressive governments/magic/vampires/spaceships/lesbian tarantula wranglers”—and declare that the Next Big Thing. And so begins the trend.

Who knows? One of you may write that book. You may be writing it right now. I can pretty much guarantee it’s not like anything that’s currently on the market. It’s the book you have to write, even though it isn’t part of a trend and nobody says they’re looking for it. That’s because they haven’t seen it yet.

So why are you sitting there reading blogs on the Internet? Get back to kicking off the latest Big Thing in Publishing so the rest of us can ride on your coattails. But hands off the lesbian tarantula wranglers. I’ve got dibs.